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We are in danger of losing speech & language therapy services for children with Developmental Verbal Dyspraxia (DVD). The NHS Ealing consultation document has this to say about the matter.

‘CHILDREN WITH RARE SPEECH & LANGUAGE DISORDER
MAY BE MISSING OUT ON SPECIALIST NHS SERVICES

Children with Developmental Verbal Dyspraxia (DVD) may not be reaching their full potential due to a lack of specialist services in London, according to a consultation launched this week.

This relatively rare speech and language disorder can have long-term implications if children do not have the right therapy early on in childhood. A new service specific to their needs would, therefore, be in their best interests, as well as highly cost-effective for the NHS and local authorities.

NHS Ealing is running the consultation on behalf of the NHS in London. It offers pupils, parents and carers, health, education, speech and language professionals and the wider public the opportunity to have their say about proposals for future services.

It also seeks to understand what potential service users, providers and commissioners (NHS and local education authorities) would want from a new service.

The consultation follows the suspension in July 2007 of a service run by the Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust at the Nuffield Speech and Language Unit in Ealing. NHS Ealing then commissioned a review of the demand for specialist services for children with severe speech and language disorders in London.

Now it has developed six service options that could help to meet this need in future, with detailed input from a wide range of interested parties.

These options include building on a service currently delivered at the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital (RNTNEH), while the London Specialised Commissioning Group determines longer-term future services for children with DVD.

The recent film ‘The King’s Speech’ has captured the public imagination and has brought to the fore the issue of speech and language impairment. Well dressed and attractive actors portray the story of King George VI and his struggle to overcome his stammer with the help of philanthropic speech therapist Lionel Logue.

The Guardian today runs this article http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/feb/06/speech-therapy-spending-cuts?CMP=twt_gu . It expresses hope that the film will ‘boost the Giving Voice campaign and highlight the social benefits of speech and language therapy (SLT).’ Logue was a philanthropist who used the money charged to his richer clients to fund therapy for poorer people. It is said that he never turned anyone away who asked for his help. This is laudable, as is the charity Giving Voice. However, I am horrified that such an essential service is being down graded to being a charitable case. The speech and language therapy services have historically been undervalued in the NHS, being under resourced and it is usual for long waiting lists to exist for children requiring therapy. Often the window of opportunity for effective treatment is diminished or lost as children wait. When you add up the social cost of children who do not have the right treatment for speech and language impairment, in terms of crime, lost job opportunities, benefit costs, it runs into billions of pounds. When you consider the costs of running an effective speech and language therapy service for all, (mere millions!), it is evident that we must invest in our speech and language therapy services. The government is morally obliged to fund these services properly, and not to rely on charitable institutions.

It is nice to think about the King receiving speech therapy to overcome his stammer, but what about the rest of us? I urge everyone, parents, teachers, medical professionals and the wider public to respond to this consultation. We can’t afford not to do so!

According to The Guardian, the NICE guidance ‘calls for every child with an autism spectrum disorder to be assigned a case co-ordinator to act as a single point of contact, and to have an individual profile created that sets out their needs.’

Surely they are missing a point? The new guidelines only call for children already diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to have a case co-ordinator. Don’t get me wrong! I welcome the introduction of case co-ordinators to work with children with ASDs but what about all the other children with equally difficult special needs? I do not think access to a case co-ordinator should be dependent on the child being formally diagnosed, or on any specific diagnosis.

Furthermore the article says that NICE has decreed ‘NHS staff need to liaise more and to engage better with schools, social care providers and voluntary sector organisations.’ They do, but surely they also need to liaise more with parents and families who know their children the best?

A case co-ordinator could be of so much help to families right from the time that concerns are first raised about a child’s condition when they first engage with NHS services. This would result in a diagnosis being made more quickly and in needs being met more effectively. Most parents of children with special needs have to go through a huge learning curve before they can be effective advocates for their children and this process can take years. A case co-ordinator who has experience of how the system works could be such a help to parents and children if they are brought in at a much earlier stage as soon as concerns are raised about a child’s development or condition. This is the time when families most need this help and when they are the most vulnerable. A case co-ordinator could pave the way for a child to access early intervention services. Early intervention is the key to children overcoming special needs at school and in life.

So I say to the new NICE guidelines on autism diagnosis, ‘Yes Please!’, but please don’t discriminate against those children with special needs who do not happen to have an autism spectrum condition, and please bring in case co-ordinators much earlier in the process of the identification and meeting of special needs. It is a fact that most children who have their special needs effectively met have motivated parents who learn to navigate the system for identifying and meeting SEN. Case co-ordinators for all children with special needs who access NHS or special education services would have the effect of levelling the playing field and – (I’m going to use a coalition buzz word here) would also make things much fairer.

If we had been presented with a case co-ordinator when Peter was nine years old, had received his diagnosis and also his statement (that came along straight after the diagnosis), we would have had no use for them. However, the early involvement of a case co-ordinator in Peter’s case would have been invaluable to us and would have saved Peter so much time, distress, sadness and despair and many wasted years at primary school.

There has been a lot of talk about how election pledges have been broken on tuition fees and on child benefit. Lots of column inches, hours of radio and television and bucket loads of spin. It was hard to watch TV, listen to the radio or read a paper without seeing the DPM telling of his angst and regret.

Almost unnoticed except for a small article in The Guardian, see it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/oct/24/michael-gove-pupil-premium – was the news that the Minister of Education had revealed that the funding for the ‘Pupil Premium’ was not in fact ‘new money’ but would largely come out of other schools funding . Why is this important? It’s important because the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Education Minister have all previously said that it would come from outside the Education budget. Was it a mistake, sophistry or downright deception? I suppose we will never know.

What I do know is that through skilful spin it has not emerged as a big issue and was not widely reported. Because of this the government’s media monitors/advisers will clap themselves on the back and say that nobody is making a fuss about this so you can go ahead and push on and cut more money from budgets for poor or disadvantaged pupils . It’s cynical, nasty and demonstrates their true colours.

You can’t do anything about the parliament at the moment because the first thing the government did was to fix the election term and make 51% the margin for a vote of no confidence. You can however influence them by campaigning in the media. I admire the skill of the Conservative spin doctors because they have made the Liberal members of the cabinet take most of the heat. They do have a weakness though in that we have seen the Prime Minister have some spectacular wobbles when public opinion goes very much against them eg. Child Benefit.

If we want a society in which we look after the vulnerable and believe in an equitable (not ‘FAIR’ ) education system we need to say so now. We need coverage in the papers, radio and on TV and then we can make this happen. I haven’t seen any money being taken from Free Schools and Academies for the few, when there are so many schools which need appropriate funding. Free Schools are not about education they are about social selection and elitism. Don’t believe me, take a trip to the Conservative Home website article on admissions policy and see what will come if we don’t object now.

I don’t believe that the case for these cuts in education has been proved. The Conservative spin campaign is masking the nasty ideology behind the re-engineering of our education system into a social and educational elitist organisation paid for by our money. The next thing to ‘go’ (ie change irrevocably) will be the admissions code. Remember you saw it here first.

There are all sorts of children who benefit from being able to have learning opportunities with support staff and this will impact immediately on levels of achievement across the board. However, children with special educational needs rely on support staff to have their needs met in school.

I quote:
‘This will threaten the extra support staff drafted in to help with teaching numeracy and literacy ….. ‘

If we lose extra support staff in schools, this will have an immediate impact on all children, but especially on those children with special educational needs who do not have statements.

I don’t yet know what the spending review will bring for schools but the rumblings I am hearing are not good. Last week the Deputy Prime Minister (DPM) reassured us all by saying that new money had been found to fund the pupil premium. In last Friday’s Guardian a ‘senior no 10 aide’ was quoted as saying: “The money for this will come from outside the education budget. We’re not just rearranging furniture – this is real new money from elsewhere in Whitehall.” On Friday the DPM repeatedly said that the funds for the Pupil Premium were ‘additional’ saying that he wanted the money to come mainly from outside the education department, rather than simply from outside the school’s budget or by cutting ‘non – essential’ education projects such as after school clubs and youth groups. ‘Mainly from outside the education department? Already this is a little different from what the ‘senior Whitehall aide’ is quoted as saying. Also, we know from the Guardian that the DPM’s plans to fund the Pupil Premium from sources outside the education department are being opposed by Treasury officials who believe that the funding should come from within education funding. However, the Deputy Prime Minister said the Pupil Premium would come from new money so I expect the DPM to make good on this commitment.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies is not optimistic about the eventual effect of the Pupil Premium: Last Friday’s Guardian also said ‘The Institute for Fiscal Studies had a gloomy first take on the proposal. While it praised the policy as “broadly progressive”, it had concerns about its effect: “Given the scale of the cuts in departmental spending to be announced next Wednesday, it seems likely that overall school funding will be cut in real terms,” said a spokesman for the institute. “If such cuts are shared equally across schools, then the pupil premium could (depending on its final size, and on the cuts to the overall budget) lead to a net result where schools in affluent areas see their funding go up on average, while schools in deprived areas experience cuts in funding.”

I agree totally with this article, and for me, Cameron’s response to the idea of sending his children to a local comprehensive school said it all. Not only that, there was recently a move by the Telegraph in it’s article by Rosa Prince ‘Sharp rise in number of special needs pupils’ to link low achievement in children with bad behaviour rather than any special educational need they might have. She speculates that these badly behaved children are being over labelled with an SEN in order to enable their schools to improve their standing in the league tables, and parents to cherry pick the best schools! See Rosa Prince’s article.

Children from poorer families are umuch less likely to have parents with the time and energy and confidence to get involved with a Free School, and will be left on the sidelines with the ‘undesirable schools’. Not only that, there is no ring fencing of the pupil premium and it looks increasingly likely that this money might not actually reach the children for whom it is intended. Unfortunately, if state schools under local authority control have to compete with free schools and academies for funding these schools will be much less able to improve. Their funding will be reduced because they will have to share it with any new academies or free schools that might have been set up in their area.

I still haven’t figured out why the government can’t simply put this vast amount of money into improving the schools we already have, for the benefit of all children.

I always try not to be too political. So here’s a comment to try to balance things up. With the honourable exception of Ed Balls we haven’t heard much about Education from the other four Labour leadership contenders. Of course, the economy dominates the headlines but here’s a challenge: rather than concentrate on what mistakes have or have not been made in running the economy, lets deal with the future of our country. Education is fundamental to all of our futures and I believe that equipping ALL of OUR children with the skills and abilities to be successful and economically/financially independent to their full potential is vital. Schools are also the nursery for successful social cohesion and any educational system which is not based on equality of opportunity is simply storing up social problems for the future.